Silence Has Never Killed a Bad Idea

A friend of mine, a historian and not a fool, put a claim to me that I have since heard in several forms: the more you argue against God, the more you spread the God meme, and the more religion thrives. Every debate is free advertising. The believer wins by being talked about. The wise atheist keeps quiet and lets the thing wither.

I think this is wrong at every step, and it is worth taking apart because a softer version of it governs a great deal of polite behaviour.

Nobody Needs Me to Hear About God

The claim assumes there is somebody, somewhere, who would not have encountered the idea of God had I not raised it.

There is no such person. You cannot reach the age of seven in any society on earth without hearing about God, usually from people who love you and mean it. The idea is on the currency, in the calendar, in the oath sworn in court, in the name of the hospital where you were born. It is the most thoroughly distributed idea humanity has ever produced.

Arguing against God introduces the idea to no one. What it introduces, if it works, is the possibility that the idea is false — and that possibility is the one thing the seven-year-old was not given. Far from spreading the meme, the argument supplies the antibody the meme has spent millennia making sure nobody carries.

Bad Ideas Die by Being Shown to Be Bad

Consider how any bad idea has actually been retired.

We had centuries in which nobody argued against religion in public, because doing so was fatal. Did religion decline in those centuries? It did the opposite. The period of enforced silence is the period of religion's greatest power, which is not a coincidence: silence is what the institution wanted, and it wanted it because silence works for it.

Or take witches. When the people in the crowd who suspected the whole business was nonsense wanted it to stop, did they hold their tongues and leave the conversation to the believers? The trials ended when people said, in print and at some risk, that there were no witches, that the confessions were extracted by torture, and that the theory made no sense. The idea died because it was attacked, not because it was ignored.

I cannot think of a counterexample. No superstition has ever been ended by its critics deciding to be tactful.

What the Argument Teaches Besides Its Conclusion

There is a third point, and it is the one I care about most.

When you work through why God is a bad idea, the conclusion is the least of what you learn. You learn to evaluate a logical argument, because the arguments for God are the most polished bad arguments in existence. You learn epistemology, because the whole dispute is about what counts as evidence. You learn some cosmology and biology, because that is where the gaps were supposed to be. You learn history, because you have to find out who wrote the books and when. You learn psychology, because you have to explain why intelligent people believe it anyway.

The debate about God is a complete education in how to think, disguised as a quarrel. Shutting it down does not merely leave the idea in place. It removes the one occasion on which most people ever practise any of this.

The Four Reasons People Give for Silence

"Do not talk about religion, it only makes things worse" is said for several distinct reasons, and they deserve separate answers.

People cannot see past religion, so arguing is futile. This is simply false as a matter of record. Secularisation is one of the best documented trends of the last two centuries. Scandinavia exists. People see past it all the time, and they do so after hearing arguments.

The backlash will be worse than the religion. Sometimes, locally, it is — a family rupture, a lost friendship. But the backlash is the cost of the disease, not of the cure. An idea that punishes people for questioning it has told you what kind of idea it is, and the correct response to a protection racket is not to pay quietly.

It could lead to civil war. This one has real weight, and there are places where it is the decisive consideration. But notice what it concedes: that the religious side is prepared to kill over the matter and the other side is not. That is an argument for caution about how and where, not for silence in the societies where nobody is going to be killed for it — which is most of them.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. I have written about this phrase before. It means the state may not coerce belief, which nobody at the dinner table was proposing. It does not mean beliefs are exempt from argument. Nothing else is.

What Silence Actually Does

Silence does not leave the field neutral. It leaves the field to the people who are still talking, and they are the believers, who never agreed to any truce. Churches do not fall quiet out of politeness. Sunday schools do not close because atheists have decided to be gracious.

A one-sided silence is not neutrality. It is surrender with better manners. If the idea is bad, the only thing that has ever worked is to say so, clearly, in public, and to keep saying it until it becomes embarrassing to hold. That is how every other bad idea went. There is no reason to expect this one to be different.